Killing Our Dreams

It turns out that owning your own craft brewery is a great way to have job satisfaction but a lousy way to make a buck.

There’s been an explosion of interest in delightful craft-brewed beers, and you would think that those small craft breweries are reaping the benefits. You’d be wrong

A thorough article in the business section of Inside Bay Area uses the story of Pleasanton, California’s HopTown Brewery to illustrate the challenges facing small-production brewers.

Just staying on the shelves is the biggest hurdle; most craft brewers aren’t big enough to go through a distributor, meaning that they have to market and deliver the product themselves, an expensive proposition.

And the craft-beer explosion hasn’t escaped the notice of corporate brewers, either:

Molson Coors, according to industry sources, was expected to have sold more than 400,000 barrels of a craft-style wheat beer, Blue Moon Belgian White Ale, in 2006. That would put Blue Moon alone as the No. 3 craft brewer, behind only Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada.